The spectral dimension of human mobility

Human mobility patterns are surprisingly structured (1–6). In spite of many hard to model factors, such as climate, culture, and socioeconomic opportunities, aggregate migration rates obey a universal, parameter-free, ‘radiation’ model (6). Recent work (7) has further shown that the detailed spectral decomposition of these flows – defined as the number of individuals that visit a given location with frequency f from a distance r away – also obeys simple rules, namely, scaling as a universal inverse square law in the combination, rf. However, this surprising regularity, derived on general grounds, has not been explained through microscopic mechanisms of individual behavior. Here we confirm this by analyzing large-scale cell-phone datasets from three distinct regions and show that a direct consequence of this scaling law is that the average ‘travel energy’ spent by visitors to a given location is constant across space, a finding reminiscent of the well-known travel budget hypothesis of human movement (8). The attractivity of different locations, which we define by the total number of visits to that location, also admits non-trivial, spatially- clustered structure. The observed pattern is consistent with the well-known central place theory in urban geography (9), as well as with the notion of Weber optimality in spatial economy (10), hinting to a collective human capacity of optimizing recurrent movements. We close by proposing a simple, microscopic human mobility model which simultaneously captures all our empirical findings. Our results have relevance for transportation, urban planning, geography, and other disciplines in which a deeper understanding of aggregate human mobility is key.